Huawei P10 review: Buy now or hold out for the P20?

Should you buy a Huawei P10 in 2018? Well, yes and no. On one hand, the big complaint we had last when we reviewed it in March 2017 was that it was expensive, and that’s now a moot point for two reasons: firstly because £550 for a flagship phone is actually quite reasonable in 2018, but mainly because it has seen substantial price cuts and can now be had for around £350 if you shop around. In fact, no need to shop around: here it is for that price at Argos and the Carphone Warehouse. 

So why would you not bite at that appealing price? Well, mainly because something better is just around the corner. The Huawei P20 is widely rumoured, and you can read up on the latest gossip at our sister site Expert Reviews right now. Even if you’re not particuarly interested in having the latest and greatest, it’s probably worth holding off to see what a new Huawei flagship does to the price of the old one.

My original review continues below.

Hey, look! There’s an elephant in the room. Dumbo – what’s your beef?

I see. Apparently the elephant’s specific grievance is the extra £100 that’s being charged for the Huawei P10 against what the Huawei P9 cost a year ago. While Huawei doesn’t say so specifically, it wouldn’t be too big a leap of logic to assume that this is down to the weak pound following the UK’s vote to leave the European Union. The company certainly wouldn’t be the first tech company to use Brexit as an excuse to raise prices.

Whether or not the price rise is justified, the impact on this review is the same: the Huawei P10 is a damned fine phone, but the price rise brings it firmly in line with the iPhone 7 and Google Pixel, making it hard to back with a full-throated endorsement. Although, of course, that may change if this year’s other flagships follow suit with a 22% price bump of their own.

Nonetheless, the Huawei P10 is a phone you’d be very happy to have in your pocket, sitting neatly alongside your newly emptied wallet. Here’s why.

Huawei P10 review: Design

The design feels very iPhone 7: minimalist and with plenty of curvy goodness. It deviates in two key areas: first, in a rebuke to its predecessor, shiny metal is out and less glossy soft metal is in. To the touch, it feels more like plastic, although whether that makes it more prone to scratches remains to be seen. Second, it has a headphone jack, which is something most people will still celebrate.

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Something that will likely split opinion is Huawei’s decision to move the fingerprint reader. It’s no longer on the rear of the handset, but relocated to the home button, in a reverse of Samsung’s decision to move the Galaxy S8’s from the front to the back.

USB Type-C charging and a microSD tray round up the features and, although our review model is an understated black, you can also take your pick from seven other colours: Ceramic White, Dazzling Gold, Rose Gold, Prestige Gold, Greenery, Dazzling Blue and Mystic Silver. 

Huawei P10 review: Screen

Whichever colour you go for, you’ll be staring at a high-quality screen as soon as you boot it up. To be specific, the Huawei P10 has a 5.1in, 1,080 x 1,920 IPS display, bordered by some pretty thin bezels on either side. That may sound a little disappointing when the Samsung Galaxy S8 pushes out a 1,440 x 2,560 resolution, but text and images look perfectly sharp and crisp. You’ll probably only notice the difference if you get up close and personal with the screen in virtual reality; otherwise, you’ll be perfectly happy.

Closer inspection via our X-Rite colour calibrator shows the screen covers 99.9% of the sRGB colour gamut, with a contrast ratio of 1,219:1. It can hit 497cd/m2 in terms of brightness, meaning you’ll be fine using the device outside, even in the promised summer sunshine that’s just around the corner.

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For the price, you may have been hoping that Huawei would have made the jump to AMOLED – sadly, this isn’t the case. Huawei has, in fact, been saving the biggest improvements over the P9 for the innards.

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Huawei P10 review: Performance

Inside the Huawei P10 is where the upgrade action has really taken place. You’re looking at a HiSilicon Kirin 960 running at 2.4GHz, backed by 4GB of RAM and 64GB of onboard storage. If that’s not sufficient, you can pop in a 256GB microSD card to top it up. For comparison, last year’s P9 ran a Kirin 955 processor and came with either 3GB or 4GB of RAM, depending on the model.

That sounds a modest upgrade on paper, but in practice it made the world of difference in our benchmarks. Geekbench 4 registered a score of 1,940 in its single-core test and 6,299 in its multi-core version. That’s an improvement of 12.4% and 29% respectively. In practical terms, that leaves it roughly level-pegging with the Huawei Mate 9, and faster than the OnePlus 3T, Samsung Galaxy S7 and iPhone 7 on certain measures.

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It gets better, though. While Huawei phones have historically struggled with our graphics tests, the company seems to have finally ironed out the issues. While the P9 managed a mere 12fps on the GFXBench Manhattan 3 test at native resolution, the Huawei P10 reached a huge 50fps. Suffice it to say, this impressive performance continued into our real-world gaming tests. There’s no need to stick to Candy Crush on this handset, that’s for sure.

You might think that this performance increase would have a knock-on effect on battery life, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. The 3,200mAh battery did pretty solidly in our tests, improving on its predecessor by a clear 2hrs 12mins, giving it a grand total of 13hrs 12mins of looped 720p video before it was out of power. While this isn’t the best performancewe’ve seen, it’s pretty respectable, and means the P10 should comfortably last the day for most people.

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One minor annoyance, though, is that it isn’t running stock Android Nougat. Huawei’s EMUI launcher has improved in recent times, but it still has its irritations. Notifications, in particular, are poorly handled; there’s no grouping, which means it’s easy to to become overloaded than it is with the standard Android pull-down.

Huawei P10 review: Camera

The camera shines once again, for the most part. Photography specialist Leica returns to do the rear camera’s heavy-lifting, and Huawei sticks with the age-old mantra of: if it ain’t broke, you shouldn’t try to stuff in more megapixels.

It’s the same camera that was in the P9, producing excellent shots, rich in detail. Provided, that is, that natural light is in abundance. The picture below – taken at MWC in Barcelona – shows exactly how grand pictures can look in the right setting. Colours are vibrant and balance is pretty much spot on.

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In low light quality suffers, with the f/2.2 aperture holding the camera back, not letting enough light in. You can see from the picture below that blur creeps in and things become much more weakly defined. There’s also some obvious noise in the darker areas.

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The good news is that after doing such a good job last year, Leica has also been tasked with improving the front-facing camera, which now has a brighter f/1.9 aperture. This produces high-quality images, even though there isn’t too much difference from last year. In fact, it actually seems to do a bit better than the rear camera in poorly lit conditions.

Huawei P10 review – Verdict

The Huawei P10 is a big improvement on the P9 in almost every area – except the camera, which has remained the same; this is no bad thing when it was already pretty good in bright conditions.

The problem is that by adding an extra £100 to the price tag, it’s no longer a decent flagship competing with overpriced mid-range phones. It’s a decent flagship competing with the best around. The Google Pixel starts at £50 more, and you can buy a Samsung Galaxy S7 for less. The Huawei P10, good as it is, struggles against the best of the best with the camera, and its software isn’t as refined either.

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Still, if prices take a tumble, then don’t let these complaints put you off. The Huawei P10 is a wonderful smartphone that you’ll be very happy to own. And if the pound’s continued struggles see other manufacturers up their prices, then this may yet end up looking like the bargain of year.